


All the Little Things

by Infinite_Finals_Week



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, M/M, Memory Loss, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:06:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23695126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Infinite_Finals_Week/pseuds/Infinite_Finals_Week
Summary: They do things that don't make sense on reflex, know things that they couldn't possibly know.They do what they need to to survive.
Relationships: Barry Bluejeans & Magnus Burnsides & Davenport & Merle Highchurch & Lucretia & Lup & Taako, Barry Bluejeans/Lup, Davenport/Merle Highchurch, Magnus Burnsides & Merle Highchurch & Taako
Comments: 6
Kudos: 55





	1. Magnus

For Magnus it's the way he meets the two of them. Taako and Merle - he knows them, he treats them as brothers. He's always been friendly, he knows that, but it's not just being friendly. It's knowing without a doubt that these people are his friends, his best friends in the world, always have been.

For Magnus it's the way they fight. It's the way the three of them click together like the pieces of an old puzzle. Taako backs himself next to him, with Merle on his other side, and when someone makes a swing at Merle he knows that he's hardy enough to be fine, but covering Taako is instinctive, and how Taako knows how to move with him, a seesaw effect that makes sure they make it out on top. 

For Magnus it's finding the robed skeleton in the cave, it's looking at Taako and thinking that he should look devastated, it's seeing the skeleton turn to dust and feeling deep-seated sorrow. He pats Taako on the back and thinks he must be hiding his feelings remarkably well, though he doesn't know why he would think that, and the though is gone from his head as quickly as it comes.

For Magnus it's dressing up as Taako for the solstice. It's the feeling of an old, old joke that he makes with a man who he's known for two months. It's the feeling of having Taako get it, having him laugh about needing new material, something that doesn't make sense but seems as natural as breathing.

For Magnus it's forgetting he's smart. He's explaining why his train plan will work, basic things about momentum and physics, but Taako and Merle look impressed. He tells them that it's just the basic stuff and the three of them laugh it off, but the moment leaves a weird taste in his mouth like he's been eating mothballs.

For Magnus it's cutting off Merle's arm and thinking he'll get a new one. He feels bad, feels terrible, and Merle _does_ get a new one, but Magnus couldn't have possibly have known he would, and it makes him wonder where the thought came from. Even as Merle flexes his soulwood arm, he can't help but think that he'll have no use for it soon.

For Magnus it's floating in the voidfish's tank and recognising the place it shows him. It's being shown circles and understanding what what he's being shown. 

For Magnus it's looking at the town of Refuge, watching the world split in two again and again and again, dying so many times, and feeling like it's his fault. Magnus has a tendency to blame things on himself, something he scarcely admits but knows is true, but this is a different kind of guilt. It's not abstract, it's a distinct sense of fault that he can't decipher the meaning of. He looks at June and he feels as though this is a direct result of something he did, even though he knows that can't possibly be the case.

For Magnus it's giving up time in Wonderland. He gives it up like he knows he has more, has all the time in the world, despite the fact that he knows Taako has done some irreversible damage to himself and won't last much longer on his feet, despite the fact that he knows he can't make it all too much longer himself and that this will only make it worse.

For Magnus it's looking at Barry and seeing much more than the man who they met over a year ago in a town now long gone. It's seeing a brother, a person who he's known for the vast majority of his life. It's looking at him, snappish and irritable, and feels not pity or annoyance but sympathy, a camaraderie that he does not know the origin of. 

For Magnus it's taking any lengths necessary to protect his friends, but feeling so deeply against turning on Lucretia, as though she is as close to him as Merle and Taako have become in the last year. It is what he feels versus what he knows, and in the end all he feels is awful.

For Magnus it's waking up to fight an army that he cannot see but that feels familiar, an army that he knows how to fight even as he has never encountered them before. It's looking through the creatures he fights and remembering all the lives that were lost, all the lives that he does not remember being lost but he somehow knows were. 

For Magnus it's trusting that they will make it through this, because they always do.


	2. Lup

For Lup it's finding the balance between existence and full sentience where she can float. It's letting her consciousness slide just enough to let her get a break from the unrelenting pain of being an entire person inside of her staff, but not enough that she is no longer any sort of person. 

For Lup it's not knowing what has happened on the outside. It's part of what keeps her going for those ten years. The other part is the knowledge that her family has as much of an idea as to what happened to her as she has of what happened to them. She holds on because she knows that if her family finds her staff she needs to signal to them what has happened to her.

For Lup it's not realising that the voices she is hearing are those of her friends, of her brother, until Merle's handle grasps her handle and she is thrown headfirst into full being. She supposes that she is lucky that her brother is stupid and headstrong enough to try again. 

For Lup it's holding on to see what they will do now that they have found her. It's hearing Barry, Barry, _her_ Barry's voice and expecting him to say something, to do something, to realise what has happened to her, but he doesn't even address how Taako's using her focus. It's wondering why they worry so much about Barry's death. 

For Lup it's hearing Lucretia talk about the "Red Robes" and the "Phoenix Fire Gauntlet" (a stuffy, pretentious name that Lup does not appreciate) and realising to some degree what has happened.

For Lup it's a state of immense concern when their little Lucy calls herself a woman in her fifties. It's wondering how much time has really passed, wondering how much time they all have left. It's hearing Davenport and feeling worry and anger and panic all wrapped up into one because this should not be their good captain.

For Lup it's taking in the energy from the arcane core and hoping against hope that how much of herself she pushes into the fireball will be enough to alert her brother and her family that something is off. There's a certain sort of warmth that fills her at being able to help, even if she is forgotten again in the aftermath.

For Lup it's fighting against curtained walls, frustrated as her boys talk about the meaning of fear. Barry's trying to tell them as much as he can in the most roundabout way possible and the other three aren't getting any of it at all. Barry's being ominous and stupid while Taako's acting standoffish and blasé, and neither of them is getting anywhere.

For Lup it's the guilt she feels when she disintegrates Angus's macarons, and the sense of success she feels when she burns her name into the wall. Angus says he's going to investigate, and while he doubts he'll get much of anywhere if her name still means little to Taako, she can't help but love him.

For Lup it's panicking just as much of the rest of them when Merle's arm gets cut off. It's feeling like Taako should be more worried about his piece of the light being used the way it is. It's expecting him to laugh at least a little at Lucretia naming it the "Philosopher's Stone" when he'd just picked a rock up off the ground and called it a day.

For Lup it's the way she reacts when Kravitz talks about hunting liches, and for a moment she doesn't care if Taako likes this boy because that is her, that is her husband, and if either of them gets hauled off to the astral plane they will not make it back. They are too integral to the way this world might end to be good and properly dead. Taako reacts in time, something that makes her angry in the moment but she is glad for later.

For Lup it's being broken free for just a second in the moment that Refuge splits apart and the entire town is devoured by the angry mother. Lup feels sympathy - she too is trapped so close to family and yet is still unable to reach them.

For Lup it's the sorrow she feels as she watches bodies fall around Taako and tears roll down her brother's cheeks in the ruined town of Glamor Springs.

For Lup it's killing Edward in Wonderland. He wouldn't have made it in the umbrella anyway. She is strong, but she can tell he is not.

For Lup it's holding on to life because she needs to protect her family.


	3. Lucretia

For Lucretia it's working to find a place to put them. It's looking at everything she knows about her family and using it to find the best place in the world for them. It's hoping, genuinely, that they will be okay and that everything will work out. 

For Lucretia it's quiet nights on the boat with Davenport. It was meant to be his, but he's in no state to drive it himself. It's fine, though, Lucretia can do it.

For Lucretia it's fighting through Wonderland. It's putting twenty years on the table and not giving a damn when she loses them because she has had so many more years than she believes she deserves in the first place.

For Lucretia it's leaving Cam behind because she feels that neither of them will survive for much longer, and she may not have much of a family left to get back to, but she has a world to fix.

For Lucretia it's setting up the Bureau. It's the paperwork and it's the lies, and making Barry into a villain he is not, or at the very least does not mean to be.

For Lucretia it's worrying about Barry. What has being alone for so long done to him? He is lost somewhere in a human body, or he is a starving lich, and if he loses control- she supposes that she'll have one less thing to worry about, but he is- or was her brother and she cannot help but be concerned.

For Lucretia it's sending out reclaimer after reclaimer after reclaimer. She trains and trains and trains them, but they are never able to resist the thrall, and she knows she's sending Brian out on an impossible mission, but then Killian contacts her to tell her how her own mission is going and about a group of adventurers who are so dreadfully incompetent, and Lucretia smiles.

For Lucretia it's watching them in the initiation test. They work together so naturally, and Taako pulls out Lup's umbrella and for a second Lucretia can't breathe. She knows exactly what it is, though not exactly what it means, and she has a roll of paper in her desk covered in ideas for _how the hell_ that could be, though she chooses not to try and decipher what that means. 

For Lucretia it's telling the boys to run if they see Barry. Heaven knows she hates it, wants to scream at the injustice of it, because that is her brother, her brother who makes stupid jokes and likes swimming even if he cannot do it well, her brother who cannot cook to save his life, who is desperately, desperately in love and does not deserve what she is doing to him. But if something must be done than it must be done. 

For Lucretia it's lying. It's all the lying, all the time. Lucretia lies about _everything_ , it's very nearly second nature at this point. The boys learn her name for a second time, and does not miss how easily they slip into calling her Lucretia. She figured if they started getting too close to things they shouldn't, she could give them a fake name, maybe throw them off a bit.

For Lucretia it's the day with Merle. She's known him for so, so long, and it is a comfort to know that, no matter what she has taken from him, at the end of the day he's still himself, full of life and hope and joy. There's a strangeness to meeting him again after such a long break and finding that he is still the same person underneath. 

For Lucretia it's sending the boys into Wonderland. She knows that at the end of the day, technically, they would be fine. But it hurts. Because thinking about Wonderland always does. Because her experiences in Wonderland dug at all of her deepest flaws, at her pride, at her inability to see anything except for the big picture. 

For Lucretia it's Magnus's death. And gods, gods, she knows something's up with Taako and Merle wanting to get into her office, but she's so glad that they're okay, and grief- this is it, she has all of the relics, if Magnus is gone he is _gone -_ is clouding her thinking. 

For Lucretia it's the genuine hurt in Davenport's eyes when he looks up to her through the barrage of memories.

For Lucretia it's trying, and trying, and trying and _trying_ to make sure that at the end of the day, her family is safe, even if that means making sacrifices, and even if that means that when everything falls they don't really want to be her family anymore.


	4. Barry

For Barry it's strange, because there's a part of him that knows he's died, and there's another part of him that tells him that that's normal, that that's just a part of the path that his existance in this universe has lead him on, even though Barry's just a _guy_ who, yes, is very interested in theoretical necromancy, but who can't test it.

For Barry it's how the panic starts to set in when he realises that this plane has designated lich hunters who aren't exactly _chill_ even if he hasn't committed any death crimes lately. They pursue him with a passion and a drive that gets worrying as soon as they reveal they know Barry's name and just how many times he's died. 

For Barry it's the strange passion that grips at his insides and tells him where to go and what to do. He wonders if somewhere along the way he was cursed, or hit with a _Command_ spell that didn't stick quite right. There are things he does because they feel right, and it doesn't matter that he doesn't know why he's doing them. This is what he needs to do to achieve- _whatever_ it is he's trying to achieve. 

For Barry it's finding a cave for himself. He knows most liches have lairs, and that honestly he should have looked for one when they had first decided that this plane was going to end up being their home, but he had gotten busy, first with the relics, and then with the war, and it didn't feel right to disappear and leave everyone alone. Not that that had stopped Lup, he thinks bitterly, but he quickly shuts himself down.

For Barry it's knowing that he has a purpose, even if he has no idea what that purpose might be. He works so hard, and in the back of his mind there are obscure concepts like having given parts of himself away, of working to find them, make himself a whole person again, but he cannot for the life of him think of a single person besides his long-gone family who he cares about enough to think about that way.

For Barry it's the maps that end up scattered all across his cave. countless lines and circles and crosses covering them in a haze of crimson almost bright enough to match his robes. He goes through records that would be indecipherable and static-filled for most people and marks down various passages, tracking the journey of Lup's Relic all across the plane. It's hard, because half of it is second hand accounts from people who heard about the Relic somewhere. Anyone directly involved usually ended up baked into the ground in a circle of glass.

For Barry it's all the books he cannot read. He has shelves and shelves of manuscripts that are all useless because he figures thery, like most of his things, have been cursed. Whoever went through his things cursing random stuff seems to have been doing it with a purpose, too, because there's a very specific few years where everything looks like if he had tried to read a book in elvish his first few years learning it. He knows most of the words, but he can't make any sense of him put together the way they are. 

For Barry it's finding out that there's only one lich-hunter dedicated enough to his job to track down one of the most powerful non-feral liches in the world. Finding out that his name is Kravitz, and that he is willing to form a rudimentary truce during a battle they know neither of them will really win. Barry also learns that he's a giant nerd who's way into the science behind magic and by the tenth time they meet, they have given up on the pretense of fighting each other.

For Barry it's dying in Phandalin and waking up with more information than he's had in _decades._ It's knowing that the boys are okay and just as stupid and wonderful as ever. 

For Barry it's going after them again and again and trying so hard to make them remember. 

For Barry it's Wonderland, warning Magnus and hoping against hope that with all of the people he has seen go into Wonderland and with how few come out, that they get so, so lucky. It's saving them from a falling pillar on the catwalk and cheering when all three of them work together to get Magnus back.

For Barry it's a lot of things, but most of it boils down to family. He thinks of Lup, brilliant Lup, and it is for family.


End file.
